reportings from the field

cutting business cards [look at that smile!] in the copy shop of la U. de Panamá


the real title of this blog is as formatted below:

Reportings from the Field

featuring:

Dinner with Mandatory Manicure

and

A Meeting with a Destitute Pianist,

or:

What Is To Be Done?

the past couple days have yielded much in the way of news and, i might add, have rendered me bone-tired, which could be one sign of a day well-spent, at least sometimes. so i'll briefly go into some of the details and the itinerary and whatnot, because i feel like this is an essential part of the process of thinking through some of the work that i'm doing here and also considering whether i need to adjust some of my practices in the future. i've accepted all of these invitations partly out of curiosity and the desire to socialize, and partly because i'm wondering if they could yield some sort of theoretical fruit. but then i realize that theoretical fruit (like this one, of which i currently possess an entire ramo) frequently needs to be cooked or processed mentally before it can be digested. there are a few steps between the observation/experience and the reflections that could emerge. so i'll consider this blog a step toward the processing of the goods, a sort of halfway house for errant ideas and erstwhile scenes. (speaking of the word erstwhile: god, i love that word, and i wish that it meant something else, so that i could use it more often. it needs to have at least three to four meanings, in my opinion, as do all mellifluous words. in fact, i think that we should really winnow down the english to about 100 very linguistigenic, polysemous words that are extremely pleasant on the tongue and in the ear. okay, i don't really think this, but.)

so on to the meat of the issue: yesterday, i was invited in the morning to do some follow-up interviewing and view performance footage that turned out to be immeasurably helpful and good for this article that i'm writing, and which is taking me for-fucking-ever to do but should turn out really well, i think. right now the ideas are really simmering - they're in that late stage of idea-development - and i'm adding some pretty magnificent seasonings, the cumin of my mind. En serio. anyhow, i'd also been invited to cook for some people from la Sociedad de los Amigos del Museo Afro-Antillano en Panamá (SAMAAP) later that evening in a different part of town. so after engaging in some important dialogue on a few details that needed clarification, we ate lunch with the mother-in-law of this playwright/activist/teacher. the mother-in-law was a 98-year-old lady who'd worked for the Canal but retained her jamaican citizenship. she was totally vivacious, with this long and impish tongue that she'd stick out while smiling the most endearing smile i've seen in a while. she was the kind of ole lady who had clearly been a sexy knockout in her youth. anyhow, she was obsessed with the color of my eyes and grabbed my hand with postpartum force. she was so alert and vivacious, even though her eyes looked like mussels in a tide pool exposed to the sun. also, i need to reiterate that the playwright/activist/teacher is intimidatingly brilliant and and empowered, and spending time with her has often made me feel sort of filled with a sense of things greater than myself and much work to do in the world. it's a good feeling with a considerable shelf life. there's more to tell about this lady and her teaching philosophy, including performance and/as pedagogy, but you're gonna have to read my article, folks! and that means that i really need to write it. but first, this.

so after that meeting, i went to the other neighborhood, picked up by another lady who's a teacher in Panama but has this thick and amazing brooklyn accent, and whose car is named "Baby" (she told us all to say "Thank you, Baby" to it when we got out, so as to keep the air conditioning running and the radio working and all that). she was conducting a meeting in the car with two other teachers, and one of them was taking minutes as we bumped along. of course, when i got in both of them wanted to know some things about me, like where i came from and whether i liked panama (the usual preliminary banter), but she said "No! No talking until this meeting's adjourned." At which point one of them protested that I ought to be allowed to take part in the meeting. so I said, "I have nothing to report at this point," making the other three laugh, and we left it at that.

we got to the house of the other lady, Marva, and just as i headed into the house it started to rain in this incredible monsoon way. it rained for several hours, flooding all of the yards and houses of everyone in this little neighborhood - each yard being a sort of box with high concrete walls, which dammed the water in and made little muddy square consecutive swimming pools. imagine a giant ice cube tray. so we watched the water roll off mango trees as these intriguing yellow-bellied squirrellike monkey creatures jumped from wall to wall and birds gathered to bathe themselves and eat some sort of gusano. i asked one guy what the bird was that i saw everywhere, and he said, "oh, that's just the regular bird," indicating that it was no big deal and didn't even have a name. then i told him about this bird with a yellow chest that i saw gripping the telephone wire outside my balcón, leonard cohen-style, and he told me that that one was called "Pecho Amarillo," which of course means "Yellow Chest." ah, birds.

anyhow, so the water was reaching comical levels - a flash flood of sorts - and people were running around trying to start their sump pumps and all that sort of thing. meanwhile, i was cooking: i made a salad of corn, culantro (which i feel sort of beats the hell out of cilantro, or at least can hold its own), beans, tomatoes, pimentón, and lime juice, as well as one of beets, onions, vinegar, potatoes, and herbs, which i let marinate for like 2 days. both turned out to be pretty great. i also made a sort of thick and intense sauce of pixbae, pimentón, aji chombo, onion, sugar, and vinegar, which i simmered for several hours. furthermore, i made these delicious sort of cookie-things that were somewhat rumpled-looking but awesome. okay, i'm lying a bit: some of these things had been made prior to the occasion, but some i made there, having lugged around this huge bag of corn and beans and other vegetable matter all day.

anyhow, at this point i was basically like a corpse, as i hadn't slept all night because of extreme caffeination. so while i was having fun cooking and watching the rain, i was also dying to go home and sleep. but the night continued, as more people showed up: pinky, this lady who specializes in nails (finger and toe); faraja, an elegant IB english teacher who works mainly out of africa, in senegal, cote d'ivoire, and now tunisia; and marshall, a former officer in the US military who i gathered was not afro-panamanian, since he didn't speak spanish or have a bajan accent, but about whom i never found out much; and various other people who came and left, including a cousin and some electricians who chatted and read magazines while fixing a device in the house. anyhow, it was eclectic company, and i felt totally at home. it was good to be swinging in someone's hammock, drinking wine, and watching the rain, i'll say.

the lady of the house, Cleotha (who everyone called Miss Christy), was the most sprightly 89-year-old i've ever met. this makes two unbelievably energetic and sharp old ladies in one day. No, three: Pinky, who looked to be about 26 (with incredibly smooth skin and seemingly no fat on her body) was 42, and she had this really collected air about her, as well as a very dry sense of humor. back to Cleotha: okay, so this lady was running around and looking like someone at the young end of her 60s, i'd have said if pressed. she readily informed me that she was 89 and "about to die" and smiled a hell of a lot while saying it. i said that i needed to learn her secret, and she said, "happiness." hm, good idea. anyhow, the whole time i should mention that i spoke in this weird mixture of spanish and english that everyone spoke in. i'm not sure why there was a need to mix the two like this, since everyone spoke spanish and english perfectly (except for me, of course - but my spanish is getting so good these days. en serio), but it seemed to be the thing to do. anyhow, i appreciated the bilingualism, and it amazed me that the majority of the afropanamanian community, with the exception of some children and older people, has this bilingualism and is therefore able to sort of exist in several circles at once.

Cleotha told me that she had worked for the post office in the US (i infer that she may have moved there after 1955, having achieved US citizenship, though she told me that the land on which the house was built has been in the family for something like 70 years, when it was a small farm - and it was partially autoconstructed "likkle by likkle," as Pinky informed me), and every time she mentioned her retirement pension, she said "God bless the USA" as a sort of coda. after dinner, she told me that i was getting fat, pounded me on the belly, and proceeded to stuff crackers into her mouth while telling me how much she liked eating fried things as she laughed and blew cracker dust in my face. hilarious lady.

Pinky came by once every two weeks to clean and paint the finger and toenails of the entire family, including the men. this was a time- and labor-intensive process involving some skin-scraping tools and things like that. pretty neat. i watched the whole thing unfold, and then Cleotha and her daughter, Marva, demanded that i have Pinky do my nails, "to attract a boyfriend." I should mention that they had tried to set me up with one of the electricians earlier in the evening, albeit in vain. he was sitting across from me, and they pointed to me and asked me my age, then to him, then back to me: "you should go out with him. he's your age." i didn't quite know if this gesture was in earnest or what, and both of them kept remarking that i would soon find a husband, since i was so young. well, uh, okay. sin comentario.

anyhow, so Pinky did my nails in this sort of bicolor style, with flowers and lunas and all these things that were, i was informed, very Panamanian. this was later confirmed somewhat disdainfully by my colombian roommate. so now i'm sporting these crazy uñas. the whole procedure involved clipping my cuticles and pushing around the skin on my fingers and filing and adjusting and balancing, and all of it was so pleasant that i was lulled into this sort of semi-conscious "pleasure coma" state, with rain sounds trickling in in the half-light of the porch. so nice.

dinner was also quite something; my labors paid off, and there were several more courses to the thing. also, faraja told us about her teaching experience in africa, and she wore this elegant senegalese garment and spoke in this low, soft voice that was measured and authoritative. very cool. she told us about a fight that she'd had with the administration, wherein she'd basically threatened to quit until she had the boss on his knees - and i regaled them with my various stories from the lectern. also, marshall turned out to be this very nice and gentlemanly guy, and i think he sort of started warming up to me. nobody else had seemed to mind the little white girl with the short hair and slightly disheveled air about her, but he was a little surprised and a bit prickly. i got the sense that he was from the States, you know? or maybe you don't. but if you want to know what i mean, we can talk later about the history of race relations in the US. uh-huh.

so that was really a good night, and when i got back to the apartment i crashed most gloriously and slept through the honking cranes and plowshares. to reapproach (and reproach) the bible: forget beating swords into plowshares - let's not beat anything for a while, okay? it's fucking noisy and leads to clamor and particulate matter in the air. and infrastructual chaos. and homeownership, which we know is a flawed system. blah!

on to the second part of the story: today i awoke all sticky and well-slept. went to meet this wacky and interesting guy, josé, at the university of panama, where he was stationed at something called the APUDEP or some such, the association of profesores of u-panama or what have you. he was tooling around on the computers there, and he told me that he'd successfully agitated for internet-wired computers in several parts of the university. huzzah! he's a marxist technocrat, and his dream is for venezuelans and cubans to invent a giant socialized system of computer-distributing and informational access to solve the world's problems. although i'm not a fan of raúl castro and i agree with my other friend josé that chávez is "un payaso," i'm not going to say anything.

josé's uniform consists of the following: jaunty maroon beret with a peace button and a canadian flag; a black shirt that says "Basta Ya!" which is also the name of one of his antiwar organizations; a long white beard; shorts (which he wears as a rebellion against the stifling attire associated with business culture, and its inappropriateness for the tropics); and this umbrella that he ties to his body with string, in similar fashion to the way that one carries a machine gun. José is involved in this organization here, in addition to sort of knowing everyone and being everywhere all the time. he does art, political organizing on a number of levels, and is a technological wizard. he walks around the campus of the university of panama knowing everyone, talking with all passers-by about their daily doings, and befriending students of all ages. we spent a while talking with the security guard, who was also a student majoring in environmental economics (something that he said went nowhere in panama, where the seco company herrera was dumping toxic waste into rivers and turning the water pink) and this group of water-rights activists who are inviting me to their next meeting; we also met a young female medical student and a teacher of "archivology," who said that she really liked my "accent," and a bunch of other people. it was lots of fun jawing away in spanish and surprising people with my conversational skills (though i think they were sort of pretending to be surprised). i felt quite the celebrity, being introduced as a professor of theatre from the US and all those bells and whistles.

anyhow, soon enough i realized that i needed some business cards to give out, and josé helped me make and print them (see picture above; note the harold arts residency shirt that i'm sporting for a product placement lark). so we made the cards, josé meticulously photographing each step, and then every time i gave one out he took a picture of the (re-staged) transaction - i'm not going to exhaust you with those, but you get the idea.

so anyhow, after having a cup of coffee and chatting with various students and profs in the café (which, i should add, was across the street from a teatro en el aire libre, as well as the cine universitario, which is having a series of showings on rainier werner fassbinder, and the health center, and a bunch of other really interesting-looking pockets of student activities and teachers' unions and things), we finally got going on our real task for the day: to find the home of this elderly, decrepit former piano savant, anita webster, and interview her a bit about her life performing in several major theatres and hotels in latin america, in addition to giving televised concerts and interviews on many radio stations in the 60s.

josé had told me a bit about this lady, but not much: he'd met her at the Café Coca-Cola, where she'd been treated to a meal and a cup of coffee, and he'd taken some photos with her and assorted other Coca-Cola regulars. he'd apparently first met her when he was a teenager and she was a famous classically trained pianist playing a bit. then, a few years ago, he'd contacted his friend, a "cineast" (his description), to make a documentary about her life. they'd conducted several hours of interviews, including a tutorial wherein she explained some of the internal functions of the piano, and she'd played a beethoven sonata in a fancy hotel in la Ciudad. however, his friend had soon returned to live in an anarchist co-op in spain and had apparently fallen somewhat out of touch. so this is what i knew on the way to visit this lady.

another thing: josé had never been to her house before, and he didn't have any contact information for her (for reasons i later found out). he only knew that she lived in a place called "la loma de morgan," about which no one else seemed to know. on our way out of the university, we flagged down about thirty people, none of whom knew where this place was save one guy who vaguely recalled hearing about it but thought that it was now called "la loma de los gringos." he told us where that was, and we went off in that direction.

we took a chiva, the People's Ride, and bounced around in our elementary-school seats to some reggaetón while josé talked to everyone on the bus. it turned out that we were squished in next to two mormons, 19-year-old corn-fed boys with pale golden skin and upturned noses, who had been living in the barrio of san miguelito for little over a year. they touted the new temple in corozal (it has white carpets, we learned, and you have to wear shoe covers when going in) and told us a bit about their practice. they were sort of impassive and seemed completely neutral about being in panama. weird. they both wore starched white shirts and ties and black pants and looked to be wilting in the heat. later on, josé introduced me to this afropanamanian guy studying "the impersonation of people like bonnie and clyde" (his words) at a school in the area and, in his spare time, leading architectural history tours down in the Casco Viejo. he was very polite and wiry, with a reggae-looking hat.

so we get off the bus still not quite knowing where we are, but i trust josé to figure it out. he keeps saying, "someone will know her." we ask everyone crossing our path, but no one seems to know where this place is, and it's kind of comical to hear him say, "conoce a una viejita que toca el piano, 'anita of panama,' ella era muy famosa en el pasado..." at some point we stop to buy her a few things - coffee and cakes - and we go into a police station (where a muslim man is being held on one seat, while two women look downcast on the other) to ask the guys about the whereabouts of this lady. none of them know anything, and they keep passing clips of ammunition back and forth and adjusting their khaki uniforms and grunting and blinking and fumbling with various objects in their pockets. they look nervous, and they're making me nervous, though josé seems very at ease and unfurls this long and sort of purple-prose speech about how they're doing really grand things for the country, etc. we realize they're not helpful in the least, though they should know the vicinity well enough. finally we encounter a taxi driver who tells us that it's something like to the left, past the school, up the hill, down, and over, and we head in that direction.

meanwhile, it's starting to rain pretty hard, and josé's taking pictures like mad of all sorts of things: autoconstructed houses built of corrugated iron and wood, the empty school (apparently the government is using some fiberglass scare to keep the kids out of school) plastered with signs advertising the local politicians (mireya lasso and someone else), and a building either being built or torn down, it's hard to say which. we keep going and hail about 30 other cabs, none of whom knows about "la loma de morgan" or the little old lady who plays the piano. none of the people walking know about it. no one. so this is a bit disenchanting, and i'm beginning to wonder if we're in the right place at all, since we got there on the advice of two random characters, one of whom nonetheless sported some pretty fancy gold teeth.

so finally we flag down a cab, and it turns out that the driver used to be some sort of low-level municipal politician, and he not only knows the neighborhood but also the lady in question. he himself is a thoroughly chistoso character with a low and raspy voice, and he tells us that we should help him write his memoirs (las memorias de un taxista or something like that) as he has "seen things that few have seen, and heard things that few have heard," and so on.

anyhow, he takes us to this house (which is fairly far away at the top of a hill that, he tells us, is also known as Cinco Pisos). the neighborhood consists largely of these small but new and brightly-painted, well-appointed homes, with gold-tipped plumbago fences and one-car garages. the suburbs. the glaring exception is Anita's house, which is made of rusted corrugated iron with giant holes and particle-board beams. the abject poverty of the house, compounded by Anita's emaciated frame, is shocking to me. also, several dozen extremely lean dogs gather around us, barking with teeth bared, as we approach. one of them keeps biting the hand and arm of Anita as if to snap it off, thin as it is. she's wearing a filthy smock and a bra, and old, rotting shoes.

Her male companion, who is never introduced and doesn't seem to speak, comes to the door first and waves away the hovering dogs with a giant stick. i am still sort of panicking at the immiseration here - a third woman is literally living in a hole in the ground, surrounded by cats, in the backyard of the place. josé now tells me the second goal of the visit: to take photographs and document this squalor, so that he might be able to enlist a team of people to help him fix this place up. he keeps saying, "what is to be done" in a way that is not really a question but more of an incantation.

and of course i'm inundated with all kinds of ideas and impulses and whatever else: extreme sadness for these two starving elderly people living in this way, with no food or electricity or water. it's insane as compared to the neighbors' houses, and as expected, the surrounding homeowners have their eyes on the property values and are trying to buy Anita out or drive her out, one way or the other. apparently a group of men came to the house recently with iron tools and attacked her dogs, breaking open the head of one of them. that one keeps running around, bleeding from the still-visible scar running over the length of his head. he seems extremely traumatized by the whole scene and keeps nervously pacing between Anita and the man. the third woman lumbers around in the back, but apparently she's lately become an enemy too: Anita took her in as a companion, and now the woman is pressuring them to give her the house. she, younger and clearly less decrepit, stays apart from the two starving old people the entire time.

while Anita talks about the death-threats made on her and her companion and the dogs (according to her, the entire neighborhood consists of jehovah's witnesses who are trying to murder her), josé takes pictures and urges me to get to the point. we sit down, and she begins to tell us about her training in Chile with a series of piano teachers; her repertoire, which consists of etudes, nocturnes, Spanish music, Chopin, Beethoven, and others; and her various gigs, in arequipe, peru; rio de janeiro; antofagasta, chile; and others that she didn't write down. i kept trying to speak to her in spanish, but she insisted that we speak only english, and her english was impeccable. in contrast to her emaciated, dirty frame, she spoke with an imperious tone about high-cultural themes: art, literature, her private education in Chile. she referred to Panama as "this hell" and cursed panamanians (who she compared to philistines, an argument that josé felt was implicitly racist). as we talked, several of the neighbors passed by and looked in disapprovingly. it was quite incredible: dogs crammed into a collapsing metal shed (Anita told us that there were 26 dogs and 3 cats living on this plot), and a roof filled with holes and with no utilities. she wouldn't let us inside but told us that she couldn't make coffee for lack of water and electricity. moreover, there was a large car sitting under this piece of roof that had fallen off (the "garage"), and it clearly had been sitting there for upwards of two decades.

so we talked some more, and she told us how she'd never had an agent but did all the contracting for gigs herself. she'd been invited on television in perú and had done several interviews, and josé really wanted some archival documentation of this, so we got her to recount some of the venues, dates, and locations for her performances so that i could scout around the archives a bit. a bit of a fight soon began to emerge: anita wanted badly to see the film that josé's friend had made of her playing piano, but josé told her that the friend would not produce any footage until the other components of the documentary - the archival texts and background narrative of her history - were in place. this seemed a bit excessive to me, and i proposed that the friend edit some of the footage into a promotional excerpt for distribution, something not too uncommon. but there seemed to be something else going on, a subtext that i didn't know, so josé and i decided to talk about this another time.

anita was obsessed with viewing the footage and appeared not to recognize her dire poverty and emaciation. josé later told me that her haughty attitude prevented her from seeking a job (she had held one as a teacher of english and 'civics,' but she was fired for some reason), and that when she'd had a good income, she'd frittered it away. i didn't quite believe this, but she did seem to be incredibly well-educated, the limit-case of an impoverished intellectual. apparently she walked several miles every day to beg for food in the casco viejo. i asked josé how she survived, and he said, "i don't know, but she fucking survives." what is to be done.

soon we realized that it was almost 5, fairly late. feeling desperate, i stuffed some dollars in her hand - basically all i had at that point - as well as some crackers that i had bought from a vendor aboard the chiva. she put the money inside her bra and started wolfing down the crackers, giving some to her companion and the traumatized dog, who also ate them with zeal. on the way back, i tried to think of possible solutions with josé, but my brain was sort of paralyzed, fogged with all of this intense stimulus. he seemed to apply some of the "blame" to Anita's intransigence, but i felt less able to adjudicate and more confused as to potential solutions. while there, he had been muttering "what is to be done," and we saw that some work had been started a while ago: someone had collected more corrugated metal for the roof, which needed fixing. but the metal lay in huge strips, and josé told me (because his own place used the same kind of metal) that you couldn't just lay it on there, you had to sort of fit it and work it in in a way that needed organization on the part of a specialized team. moreover, he noted that if we went into the house to clean and dig and rearrange, we'd encounter vastly more difficult unexpected obstacles in the piles of leafy mud and trash that lay everywhere. i saw what he meant.

so i suggested that we meet again to talk this over, and in the meantime we plan to bring the couple some cooked food, albeit food that they could chew (since neither had many teeth). but i don't exactly know what is to be done when one doesn't have family or friends. this came in striking contrast to the people of last night, who were not wealthy but had survived years of US racism and Panamanian xenophobia to form deep-set multigenerational connections and "make do" in that de certeauan sense. anyhow, vamos a ver.